Theresa May blasts woeful cops over domestic violence
Home Secretary told rank & file cops far too many of them had a ’shameful’ attitude and treated it as a 'second-class crime'
THERESA May yesterday told rank and file cops far too many of them had a “shameful” attitude to domestic violence.
The Home Secretary said attacks and emotional abuse behind closed doors were “all too often treated as a second-class crime”.
She told the Police Federation union conference in Bournemouth that too often “blame and recrimination” were “cast back at victims”.
Mrs May added: “In many cases, brutal violence was downplayed as ‘just a domestic’ and too little was being done to protect victims and families.”
She said a damning 2013 review into domestic abuse investigations had exposed “the shameful attitude of some officers towards victims who had suffered violence and psychological abuse”.
In one incident a victim overheard an officer say to a colleague: “It’s a DV, we’ll be a few minutes and we’ll go to the next job.” In another an officer was recorded calling a victim a “slag” and “bitch”.
Mrs May praised cops for improvements in their responses since the review.
But she said she had ordered a probe into officers developing relationships with victims of domestic abuse.
She went on: “We do not know the true scale of this, but everyone in this room will know it goes on far more than we might care to admit.”